Chapter Text
I don't know your face no more
Or feel your touch that I adore
I don't know your face no more
It's just a place I'm looking for
I don't know your thoughts these days
We're strangers in an empty space
I don't understand your heart
It's easier to be apart
(x)
One
He woke to devastation.
The first time he’d regenerated it had been a choice - an angry choice with no possible alternatives - but a choice nonetheless. And he’d walked away with that clarity and sharpness of purpose inbuilt; as clear and bright and uncompromising as his fiery hair.
But this time…
Maybe a Matrix had been a vanity project; thinking that he could re-create what the ancients of Gallifrey had built, all on his own.
Foolish, ridiculous vanity was certainly his main thought once he woke and understood what had happened. A simple miscalculation, somewhere, somehow, and he’d only realised it at the last moment - having but a fraction of a second in which to prepare himself for the blast which tore through decades’ worth of work; the destruction so complete that once he came round (new body, new eyes, new mind) he was paralysed for hours by the loss.
He sat up slowly, working out the passing of time by the position of the suns, and for hours merely observed the destruction all around him. There was nothing salvageable, nothing to show the attempted grandeur that had been there so very recently, only debris and mangled metal stretching further than his eyes could see.
(What colour were his eyes this time, he wondered idly. What colour his hair? What did he look like? It didn’t really matter. What mattered was the failure now etched into him.)
Eventually he got up, new legs unsteady beneath him, knowing he should be grateful he’d been at the periphery - had he been closer to the centre of the explosion he’d have been gone for good.
And when would someone have discovered this? He was alone on the planet, and although Roda and Jack dropped by now and again, it could have been an age before anyone realised he was dead…
He’d always sought out solitude, but in that instant the loneliness weighed on him.
Thankfully the laser had escaped unscathed, so he teleported back to his house, pulled on whichever clothes were nearest to hand (ill fitting, dishevelled, but he didn’t care, they were better than the beautifully tailored suit he’d put on that morning, now torn to shreds) and went to find his lover.
(“I screwed up. Really screwed up. Can I cling to you for a while, until I find my bearings again?”)
But it was not to be…